“Her foot!” he screamed. “It’s stuck!” he said, drawing the crowd’s attention to the source.
“Her foot’s trapped,” the front of the crowd telephoned to the back.
“She wasn’t stabbed,” someone said, disappointed.
A few months earlier, Fadi had appeared at an appointment at the American Consulate in Dubai and asked for permission to travel home with me for the summer. To mark proof of his existence, my husband carried with him a hand-written travel card, not a passport. Without a passport, his world was restricted to a small area of the Middle East; his life choices were similarly restricted by the fate he was born into as a refugee. In Lebanon, he wasn’t allowed to study to become a doctor or a lawyer or an engineer; Lebanese officials feared he might take jobs from their citizens. But teaching? Okay. As long as he taught other refugees.
LOOK, Fadi’s text read with a picture of a US visitor’s visa. Another text followed: I can’t believe I’m going to America. I wasn’t surprised. I was an American; he was my husband. It was the obvious, logical outcome of his visit to the consulate. At least, to me. But, Fadi was a Palestinian refugee and, in all his years of requesting travel visas, he had only been granted permission to travel to the UAE, China, and Saudi. A man without a country is a risk to the visa grantors; he might not return to the unknown, the unknowable. To Fadi, being denied was the more obvious, logical outcome.
When we finally landed in New York, he was bright with the possibilities of the US. Until we reached immigration. As an officer thumbed through his travel document, a question registered in his eyes: What is this? His focus turned to me. Who is she to him? Did she marry him, so he could get a passport? Did he pay her? He looked back to my husband’s travel document and uncaged the walkie-talkie from its leather sheath at his side.
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